Cover story: In the hypocrisy of climate geopolitics, the trade-off is simple. African countries are expected to toe the global north’s line, in exchange for cash.
But the cash never arrives, even as Africa is forced to do as it is told. Leaders smile for the cameras at climate negotiations before going home to countries that cannot develop. This dynamic must change. African countries need to do it their own way. Fast.
Inside issue 102
Somalia: Al Shabaab is on the back foot.
South Africa: Stalingrad or stalling grandad — Zuma’s comeback.
Nigeria: Meet Peter Obi, the outsider who just might be president.
Cameroon: How women are driving agriculture in the north.
Prayer or prophylaxis: our public health messaging fail in this week’s @afrobarometer graph.
Review: The #WomanKing gives Africa a visually spectacular hero movie.
Eritrea: Still Africa’s worst jailer of journalists.
This is the last edition of this season. Sometimes, news can be overwhelming – to read as well as to report. We all deserve a break. That’s why we take regular publication pauses to make sure that we can keep doing this for the long haul.
Look out for our next edition, Issue 103, on 6 November 2022.
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On this day a year we told you the system was rigged.
The Pandora Papers was one of world’s biggest data leaks in history. It took 150 newsrooms around the world – including The Continent – to sift through the nearly 12-million files obtained by the @ICIJorg.
In Issue 63 (October 9 2021) we looked not just at the individuals implicated in the documents, but also what they tell us about the world the super wealthy built – and how they pick and choose the rules. As @WillFitzgibbon said: “We have receipts…”
This exposé opened up the secret world of tax loopholes and offshore accounts that rich people use to hide their money. What it also shows us is the mechanism by which Africa is kept poor – and why the developed world is so reluctant to change it.
The Sahel is what ecologists call a “realm of transition” – a vast, semi- arid landscape stretching from one coast of Africa to the other, separating the harsh desert of the north from the more fertile savanna and rainforests of the south.
After this week, political scientists might start using the term too.
👆 The above was part of a news analysis which was in a news package The Continent carried in Issue 73 on 29 January 2022.
🇧🇫 Burkina Faso is going through its second coup in one year. What’s going on? Who are the key players, and more importantly, who trained them? Issue 73 offers some context.
🧵 There’s an ongoing fight for the future of farming and Africans are finding they are having to farm the way the Gates Foundation wants them to.
💡 As Million Belay and Bridget Mugambe see it, there are two competing – and mutually exclusive – visions for the future of African agriculture.
🌾 The first, espoused by their Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), prioritises small-scale, eco-friendly cultivation in which farmers grow a variety of nutritious crops while protecting biodiversity.
The system is rigged. And it’s working as intended.
The Pandora Papers is the biggest data leak in history. It took 150 newsrooms around the world – including The Continent – to sift through the nearly 12-million files obtained by the @ICIJorg.
In this special edition, we look not just at the individuals implicated in the documents, but the so-called infrastructure of secrecy made and enabled in the West and used to loot Africa. The super wealthy get to pick and choose the rules. Hope has not abandoned us, however.
In our newsroom we aspire to live by the African-American saying “Say it with your chest”. And we invite others to do the same.
When we interviewed @AfricaCDC boss @JNkengasong, he said, “Europe is trying to vaccinate 80%. The United States is trying to vaccinate everybody. They will finish vaccinating, impose travel restrictions and then Africa becomes ‘the continent of Covid’”. He was right.
It’s no secret that there are very few vaccines making their way to Africa. Why?
Have you ever wondered why so many African flags seemingly follow the same colour scheme?Lazy designer? Coincidence? Nope.
Find out how Marcus Garvey, a black star and a Ghanaian woman named Theodosia Okoh inspired this week’s foray into vexiollogy.
There will be a quiz!
Tanzania, not to be outdone by the US, is back again in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. After berating a lawmaker for wearing a mask, President Magafuli’s behaviour during the pandemic has managed to hide something else: the steady march of authoritarianism.